The Key to Defining Dwarves or Lemuel Gulliver’s Final Voyage

After his last feature Krajinka, Martin Sulík started concentrating on documentaries. He has now made four. The Key to Defining Dwarves… is about one of the least known figures from the Czechoslovakian nouvelle vague, scriptwriter and director Pavel Jurácek. Sulík’s documentary turned into a filmic essay, based on the diaries of Jurácek. Sulík strived to integrate all aspects of Jurácek’s life into the document: his complex private life, his work and his social activities in the difficult period prior to and after the Prague Spring. An ambitious undertaking, but he and his crew have been eminently successful. The camera and production design are used to evoke the mood of the 1960s and the intimacy of Jurácek’s diaries are beautifully depicted.The film is a ‘documentary mystification’, a collage in which archive footage and photos from the time are combined with acted fragments. What makes the film so interesting is the successful attempt to reconstruct the context of and the social background to the Czechoslovak ‘film miracle’. The fact that the role of Pavel Jurácek is played by his son Marek makes the result even more authentic.Two films of Jurácek will be shown at the festival.